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Wednesday, December 22, 2010

How America won public support for its imperial adventure in the Philippines

Coffins of U.S. Soldiers Killed in Philippine-American War, c.1906.Stacks of coffins are not exactly an ideal propaganda tool, but... supporters of America's battle to subdue revolutionaries in the Philippines used this early 20th-century photograph as they faced criticism over alleged atrocities by American troops. Spain ceded its Philippine colony to the U.S. after the Spanish-American War, and troops were in the country for more than a decade trying to defeat guerrilla fighters and entrench America as a colonial power. More than 4,200 U.S. soldiers died between 1898 and 1902, the official duration of the war, and casualties among Philippine fighters and civilians numbered in the hundreds of thousands.

Photo from the Burns Archive, “a collection of historic images that uncover our astonishing past.” Caption from the Newsweek slideshow excerpting rare and unusual images from the collection, including “pictures of slaves freed and a black man lynched, of policemen posing beside the Ku Klux Klan, of a Nazi fighter pilot, an Italian assassin, Japanese geishas, medical oddities, a man tarred and feathered, the victims of the infamous Tuskegee experiment... and photographs of dead people lovingly arranged by loved ones for a departing portrait.”

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